Everybody screws up. This is especially true on something as fast-moving and high-stakes as a presidential campaign. Even the sophisticated, ultra-disciplined Mitt Romney campaign of 2012 fumbled the ball, sending Clint Eastwood out without a script, as a “surprise guest” speaker in front of some 30 million viewing Americans on the final night of his nominating convention.
The resulting “empty chair” monologue will be remembered in the annals of political flubs far longer than the latest Team Trump screw-up, in which a chunk of Melania Trump’s speech was lifted directly from Michelle Obama’s 2008 convention speech.
Donald Trump’s campaign will survive this plagiarism scandal. But whereas the Eastwood gambit was a rare misstep for the Romney campaign, that’s far from the case with the current GOP nominee.
Trump, in what should be a devastating indictment of his business-leader persona, is running the most half-assed, poorly managed national general-election campaign of modern times.
Republican veterans, along with other political insiders, were tweeting about the screw-ups just in the first day of the convention. There was the inexcusable plagiarism, of course—normal campaigns review all speeches carefully, including software checks for lifted passages. There was also the mishegas around the rules challenges, coming from Trump opponents, which was mishandled into a mess. Then the program ran significantly behind schedule, with nothing done to bring it back on target; this meant that some speeches meant to air during the crucial 10:00 ET hour, when the broadcast networks were live from the convention, went on after 11:00. The sequencing, with frothing-mad Rudy Giuliani and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn bookending Melania, was jarring to say the least. Delegates began filing out in droves after Melania’s speech, leaving TV viewers to see a mostly empty hall.
There were other problems, purely of Trump’s own making. He did a call-in interview live on FOX News—apparently without the knowledge of Paul Manafort, the guy running the campaign—probably pulling viewers away from an emotional speech by Gold Star Mother Pat Smith, taking place at the convention at the time and carried live on C-SPAN. He also reportedly stood up a group of top corporate campaign donors.
Unfortunately for his team, Trump seems compelled to step in his own campaign’s way like that, and will surely continue to do so.
That’s a separate challenge, however, from the fundamental one of organizational incompetence.
In mid-June, roughly six weeks after Ted Cruz and John Kasich dropped out of the Republican contest, allowing Trump to concentrate solely on the general election, MSNBC.com concluded that “Donald Trump does not have a campaign.” The Guardian reported around the same time that Trump’s campaign, with fewer than 100 staffers, was outnumbered 10-to-one by Hillary Clinton’s.
The campaign was woefully behind in establishing a communications team, a fundraising operation, field offices in crucial swing states, a surrogate network, and a data management and analysis center. It has been trying to build all of those out at once, while also putting together this week’s convention.
To some degree, the slack has been made up by the Republican National Committee and other organizations. But that can only relieve so much of the pressure. Campaigns themselves still must do hundreds of things every day, from picking event locations to choosing wording on press releases. There are many, many things to get wrong.
In that Guardian piece, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski claimed that the campaign would hire between 100 and 150 new people in the next month. Lewandowski himself, however, had just been fired—the result of a wildly dysfunctional clash among him, Manafort, and members of Trump’s campaign.
As that suggests, the insufficient size of the staff is only part of the problem. Trump puts important functions in the hands of people he trusts—his son-in-law, for example, and longtime Trump employees—despite their utter lack of relevance or expertise. That’s how one of the campaign’s biggest unforced errors happened. A longtime Trump flunky, Dan Scavino, has inexplicably been the campaign’s social-media director; he was behind the anti-Semitic tweet using a Jewish star over piles of money to accuse Clinton of corruption.
Scavino has not been fired—one of many examples where Trump has placed personal loyalty over organizational needs. Lewandowski’s long tenure, even after blatantly lying about an encounter with reporter Michelle Fields, is another.
Other signs of a poorly-managed organization are rampant: in-fighting, indecision, media leaks, and opposing messages coming from different parts of the campaign.
We’ll get a bit of a new look inside the organization, probably late Wednesday, with the filing of the next campaign-finance report.
But we will likely see the symptoms of the problem in Tuesday night’s convention program, and through the rest of the week—and next week, during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and in the campaign beyond that.
